I agree with most everything except that you will spend $300 on a bluRay Player. I don't think BestBuy even carries one over $120 (unless you add 3D AND video recording). Talk about technology passing quickly

That could very well be. The one I have now I spent about $300 on but it is a higher end Sony audio receiver -- of which the only things it receives are the DVD/BD internal player and that ancient VCR for when we want to watch a videotape. So I'm definitely not getting my money's worth, but had hoped that buying higher end meant getting something that would last -- so much for that theory (or maybe it DID last much longer than if I had bought something more basic).

 

But most consumer electronics devices are so cheap that repair is no longer feasible, it is automatically replaced with a new unit.

Very true. With respect to computers, we went from 8088, 186, 286, 386 486, 486DX, Pentium, Pentium II, Pentium III, Pentium IV in a blink of the eye. Each generation the price for a computer was dropping and if there were a failure that approached 50% the cost of a new "improved" computer, the old one was discarded.

I don't know if anyone ever timed themselves when they "restored" Windows about a decade ago. I mean from reformatting the disk through all the latest drivers. If you charged for your time, your talking about 4 hours in all. It's a good thing you could multi-task that job with others, else that simple job would send people to a new machine.

Why were the prices the way they were? Did you know the excise tax on whole units was cheaper than the individual components?

Twenty years ago, thanks to the manufacturing processes at the time, with respect to soldering, there were a lot of cold solder joints that caused failures.

Television repair became cheaper due to swapping out the whole chassis vice troubleshooting. It was less labor intensive to swap out the chassis and send it back to a repair depot offshore.

Commercial products remained top quality and were priced accordingly.

 

How about unplanned obscolence that as it says isn't planned but does occur? But some day, hardware innovation will slow down.

Maybe mobile devices should be excluded because its such a junk culture especially on the low end- only one example built in mobile phone games that not just don't make fun to play- they are on the brink of unplayability.

Here in our country it is gross, one street (and there are more) full of shop windows with used mobile devices. Prices are not really lower than for new ones even higher. I wonder how they make a living. It's a wrong economy.

Normally if I buy some device I expect at least 3 years, better 4 or 5.

With the high volume of devices seen cycling through these shops it rather can be measured in months.

Obscolence not through failure but the users wanting to get rid of their devices.

And back to the topic- obscolence is built in through wall adapters and their plugs. It is just two poles but why cant there be just one or two standard voltages and plugs? No there need to be 100s.

Many users dont know anything about electricity and cant reasonably get replacements, so they keep it and regularily you can see people showing off their partially broken devices.

OK used to hoard thousands of songs- doubtful if after a while they are still listening to it and doubtful if they were paid for.

You could write a dissertation about all the aspects- Shift of obscolence observing 1980s consumer electronics and comparing to modern mobile devices- user expectations and typical lifetime.

Awaiting the next breakthrough- Guarantee and emissions conformity and RoHS certificate in Braille language not to discriminate special population groups such as deafmutes (where it is questionable if they'd have much use for ipods, mobile phones or a Playstation TM).

 

The Dissertation in the final chapter would elaborate that all this correlates to the hunter/gatherer skills aquired over the past 3 million years and it is so deeply buried that these instincts are very hard to get rid off.

Hunting for new products all the time even if indeed you dont need any.
Gathering thousands of songs for one reason- to have on pile as many as possible in order to secure the survival of the group.

However, it is not really beneficiary towards that.

The author gets a top degree + gets hired by these ominpresent headhunters and 100k straight away + benefits. The company who hired him makes billions and saves mankind as such. No more patent nonsense.

 

In a switcher, those caps SELF HEAT because high freq ripple current flows through them. They must be placed within a cm of the switch device to have any effect or else trace inductance will effectively remove them from the circuit. They are not intentionally killing the caps, they have to be placed near the power devices: ...

I understand that, and have designed commercial SMPS products myself.

But as someone who also has decades in repair and has seen inside thousands of commercial designs I have also seen the rise of designed obsolescence.

The cap I am talking about is not a SMPS output cap in the main current path, it is a low-power supply filter cap from a winding that powers the SMPS IC "brain". A manufacturer like Sony in their better end models puts the cap 30 mm from the heatsink. In Sony's cheap models the cap is 10 mm from the heatsink. In many cheap brands it is practically touching the heatsink.

Same for the mechanicals in VCRs and DVDs. They use linkages designed to break, and each year with the new models we could see those linkages getting smaller and weaker.

One shop I owned was a Mitsubishi service agent and we had problems with a particular Mitsubishi VCR model which broke linkages. After talking with other service shops who experienced tha same issue we sent note to Mitsubishi about the weak part.

Their response was along the lines of "That part has sufficient strength to last the design life of the product". In other words; "Yes, it's designed to break after 8 months so people have to buy a new VCR".

I just don't know where exactly the decision would be taken to design something for failure.
...
Don't know about consumer electronics, but in the industrial realm you have a reputation to lose. You just don't do that with your customers.

Industrial electronics and consumer electronics are TOTALLY different. Consumer electronics is only about ONE thing; max sales.

A product that fails in one year produces a LOT more sales. Repeat business.

A product that lasts for 10 years produces many times less sales.

 

"Industrial electronics and consumer electronics are TOTALLY different. Consumer electronics is only about ONE thing; max sales.

A product that fails in one year produces a LOT more sales. Repeat business."



Agreed.
Years ago, a friend gave me his old SONY Betamax for parts. ((The format is virtually obsolete, though an updated variant of the format, Betacam, is still used by the television industry.[2]))
The parts inside had a higher level of "second operations" done.
No burrs on any mechanical, moving parts/linkages. And, they used heavier gauge steel; for the linkages back then.

(( Betamax and VHS competed in a fierce format war, which saw VHS come out on top in most markets.[7]))

 

Ok, it seems we have at least part of the answer to my question. Consumer electronics and industrial electronics are different. I worked mainly on industrial.

However, maybe there is a misunderstanding. I was actually referring to something I heard some time ago. People claimed their printer had some sort of timer built in that would make it stop working after a certain amount of time.

For all the examples that where given here I still have a hard time to believe it was done on purpose. How would the manufacturer "calculate" the time to fail?

Anyway, from a sales perspective it certainly makes sense to make stuff last less longer.

I'm sure it won't be like this forever. E.g. when energy prices go up. New techs should still acquire some component level troubleshooting skills. Could be helpful in the future. It makes me sad when all techs do is replacing boards. Where is the fun in that?

 

A product that fails in one year produces a LOT more sales. Repeat business.

A product that lasts for 10 years produces many times less sales.

Maybe.

If a consumer feels like he didn't get his money's worth from a particular model or brand, he isn't likely to buy that particular model or brand again.

If you bought a $10k big screen TV, and it failed to the point of being economically unrepairable in a year, I don't think you would buy that model again, and would be unlikely to buy another model of the same brand.

On the other end of the scale is a $20 wrist watch. If it lasted a year or two, and you liked the styling or features or whatever, you might well buy the same model and brand again.

And don't forget that manufacturers better be more interested in maximizing $profit than $sales. If not, they won't last long enough for their reputation to matter.

 

If a consumer feels like he didn't get his money's worth from a particular model or brand, he isn't likely to buy that particular model or brand again.

When ALL manufacturers are doing the same thing the number of people changing their preferred manufacturer will be similar so in the end every manufacturer still gets the same number of customers. In the end you can be disappointed with every brand.

 

working on industrial systems, and some home entertainment systems, it sure seems to me that most failures are electrolytic caps.even on high dollar industrial controls, caps fail at a high rate. from what I have found, the current caps are made in china from cloned korean caps, which were made from cloned japanese caps, which were copied from American caps. cach clone or copy got a little cheaper, till now they dont have the same internals and chemicals they origionally had.

 

working on industrial systems, and some home entertainment systems, it sure seems to me that most failures are electrolytic caps.even on high dollar industrial controls, caps fail at a high rate. from what I have found, the current caps are made in china from cloned korean caps, which were made from cloned japanese caps, which were copied from American caps. cach clone or copy got a little cheaper, till now they dont have the same internals and chemicals they origionally had.

Read about the capacitor plaque?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

 

"Industrial electronics and consumer electronics are TOTALLY different. Consumer electronics is only about ONE thing; max sales.

A product that fails in one year produces a LOT more sales. Repeat business."

Well, then let's make products that fail in a month and we get twelve times the repeat business!

 

Much of the wailing in this thread has not been about planned obsolesence, but equipment failure, premature or otherwise.
Surely to be be obsolescent, not broken, equipment must be still functional, just providing a facility no longer required?

That definition of planned obsolescence could well be applied to much software.

I also found Sony 8 Hi8 and video and video editing equipment to often lack a vital feature "available in the next version".

 

Much of the wailing in this thread has not been about planned obsolescence, but equipment failure, premature or otherwise.

True but, when premature failure is the direct result of allowing rapid aging in order to squeeze a few cents out of the manufacturing costs, it's hard to tell the difference.

 

Their response was along the lines of "That part has sufficient strength to last the design life of the product". In other words; "Yes, it's designed to break after 8 months so people have to buy a new VCR".

I never attribute to guile or malice what is commonly the fault of ignorance, incompetence and or greed. I have never seen any products intentionally designed to self destruct, I have seen thousands designed poorly or "cheaped out" with short life components but that was completely driven by saving a few pennies.

 

When ALL manufacturers are doing the same thing the number of people changing their preferred manufacturer will be similar so in the end every manufacturer still gets the same number of customers. In the end you can be disappointed with every brand.

I don't believe that's universal. I bought a Sony Trinitro TV in 1998 and it lasted until this year. I bought an e-machines PC which was absolute junk. I replaced it with an expensive HP and it was absolute junk. It's a crap shoot, in the product areas where price pressure is high, quality is the first thing sacrificed.

 

working on industrial systems, and some home entertainment systems, it sure seems to me that most failures are electrolytic caps.

Look up their MTBF lifetimes: most are in the range of a few thousand hour ballpark. That's why.

 

Read about the capacitor plaque?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

I remember distinctly that Jim Williams (the guru at Linear Technology) wrote an article about how defective elec caps were killing the PCs at very early age and explained all this back then...... and the article was rapidly taken down because it had infuriated the Pacific Rim sites who were prime customers of Linear Technology. But I do remember he published an article about it.

 

True but, when premature failure is the direct result of allowing rapid aging in order to squeeze a few cents out of the manufacturing costs, it's hard to tell the difference.

So what should they do?

Design all items to last at least 100 years? But then when they start failing at 100 years people will complain that they were designed to fail at 100 years and not 200.

You are in charge of designing a new consumer product. How long do you design it to last?

 

I'm hoping my 10000 year clock will run until the Year 9999.

Inspired by the 10000 year clock project from the Long Now Foundation:

http://longnow.org/clock/